Long hours are a fact of life for solicitors, and with client expectations on the rise is achieving a work-life balance possible? Derek Bedlow reports




The possible suicide of young Freshfields associate Matthew Courtney last month brought the sort of headlines that every law firms dreads.



‘Promising lawyer fell to his death after raising fears over his work-load,’ ran the headline in the Daily Telegraph, while the London Evening Standard was rather more succinct. ‘Stressed lawyer plunges to death,’ it wrote, accompanied by the rather unlikely claim that he was putting in 16-hour days, seven days a week.



At the time of writing, there was not any proof that Mr Courtney’s working hours were solely or even partly responsible for his death, but what the traumatic episode has done is bring into the public arena a topic that has been raging within the legal profession for many years, and more recently has been moving up the profession’s agenda. Indeed, only the month before, the Law Society launched its ‘Quality of life campaign’ – aimed at encouraging firms to adopt more flexible working practices – while numerous commentators in the legal press have placed the work-life balance at or near the top of assistant and associates’ main concerns about their working lives.



In the past 18 months or so, City firms have begun to respond with a raft of flexible working initiatives aimed at improving their employees’ experience. Simmons & Simmons, for example, has rolled out a package that includes the possibility of term-time working and sabbaticals; Allen & Overy has introduced three-year career breaks for some of its staff and brought one of its associates onto its management board, while Clifford Chance’s newly re-elected senior partner, Stuart Popham, has made improving the work-life balance one of the priorities of his new term of office.



But however welcome these initiatives are, they can only go a small way to addressing the fundamental problem facing corporate lawyers – too much work and too little time. The evidence is that, in the short-term at least , there is little that law firms can do significantly to reduce the work-loads of their assistant and associate lawyers.



Providing flexibility is actually becoming more difficult, as the proportion of transactional work – with its immovable deadlines – that law firms handle increases at the expense of less-urgent advisory tasks. Even for the latter, the faster turnaround times made possible by technology have irreversibly raised client expectations, while the rather macho approach of some heads of legal towards their private practice panel firms means that few consider the welfare of the junior lawyers that service their work.



It is noticeable that while some companies have begun to question the diversity polices of their legal advisers, there are few examples of clients doing the same in terms of their general employment practices.



As people businesses, staff may be law firms’ biggest asset but they are also their biggest expense, and significantly reducing their hours would go directly to the bottom line. While high staff turnover rates represent a major expense for law firms (the Law Society estimates a cost of £150,000 per £50,000 of salary), maintaining short-term partner profitability is key to retaining leading partners. And at a time when US firms are successfully luring big hitters away from the Magic Circle, firms cannot afford to allow their profitability to drop.



Law firms’ lack of room to manoeuvre in this regard is illustrated by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) annual survey of law firm economics, which found that the chargeable hours billed by staff at the top-25 practices actually decreased by 3% in the year to 2006.



In the other direction, there is also relatively little evidence that offering a better work-life balance would significantly enhance a firm’s success in the recruitment market, if only because potential recruits do not particularly want to risk leaping from the frying pan into the fire, and there is a ready supply of Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans to plug the gaps. ‘People tend to prefer to go in-house if they don’t want the hours,’ says Richard Ziegler of recruitment consultants EJ Legal. ‘I don’t think that many people trust another private practice firm to be better than their existing employers.’



There is also some conjecture over whether the work-life balance situation really is worse now than in the past, although anecdotal evidence would suggest that the present market conditions are placing an additional burden on lawyers. The significantly higher rates of pay enjoyed by junior lawyers since the beginning of the decade have resulted in a much sharper focus by firms on hitting billable hours targets than in the past.



Lawyer welfare group LawCare says that work-related stress is a growing problem, while Young Solicitors Group chairman Matthew Claxson adds that the growing sophistication of many clients is bringing additional pressures on junior lawyers. ‘Solicitors need to know more from day one than they did because clients are much better informed,’ says Mr Claxson. ‘This also means that firms have to be more cost-efficient and younger solicitors are given more responsibility.’



But while these market changes are creating greater stresses and strains, perhaps more fundamental to perceptions of work-life balance is a change in the mindset of young solicitors and, in particular, the declining availability and attractiveness of the traditional career path for solicitors – partnership.



As illustrated by the PwC report, many law firms are dealing with profitability issues by freezing or restricting the size of their equity partnerships, thus reducing the chances of attaining that level for today’s assistants and associates. An increasing number are also unilaterally opting out of the partnership rat race.



‘Where in the past equity was awarded at the age of 30 or 31, now it’s more likely to be when lawyers are in their mid-30s, so younger lawyers are faced with an additional five years of insecurity,’ says management consultant Tony Williams of Jomati and the former managing partner of Clifford Chance. ‘And while the perception in the past was that once you made partner you could spend your time schmoozing clients on the golf course, partners work as hard as anyone else now, so assistants and associates face another 20 years at the same or even greater pace. There’s a high price to pay for the eventual rewards, and many people don’t want that deal.’



But without the prize of a lucrative partnership, increasing numbers of lawyers are beginning to resent the imposition that their work is making on their personal lives, reducing their morale and, in turn, their productivity. Law firms are attempting to address this issue by creating alternative career paths, but with the classic ‘pyramid’ business models of most law firms, retaining large numbers of senior lawyers outside the partnership is not an easy process.



More generally, dissatisfaction with work-life balance is often a symptom of cultural issues at law firms – for example, when lawyers feel their efforts are unappreciated – which some firms are attempting to address through partner education and improvements in working practices.



One such is Norton Rose. ‘Technology allows work to be carried out in a number of different ways,’ says its head of human resources, Lak Purewal. ‘What is increasingly important is the output, not necessarily where the work is carried out.’



Nevertheless, there are no quick fixes for many of the work-life balance problems experienced by young lawyers. While the profession probably can do better to ameliorate the worst excesses of employment, personal sacrifices will always be part of the job description of professional advisers. Life at a firm like Clifford Chance, Mr Popham told the Gazette last week, ‘will always involve long hours on occasion’.



‘The legal profession is a high-pressure environment and lawyers’ pay reflects that,’ says Mr Williams. ‘A degree of stress and pressure is healthy. The challenge for firms is to be able to spot when it’s becoming a problem for individual lawyers, so that people can continue to get the excitement of working on high profile deals without it becoming destructive.’



Derek Bedlow is a freelance journalist